montanatoast katakana-iroha & cjk-ideographic

i'm curious just how many users out there can actually see the fancy asian list bullets i used in the montana and mcdeviltoast blog. i only have two browsers installed on my new computer (IE6.0 and firefox 1.0.1), so those are the only ones i tested it in (OS is XP SP1).

in firefox it renders beautifully, with each list taking on a different exotic bulleting style from out east. i honestly don't know what any of them are really supposed to mean: i'm sure some of them are numbers, but maybe not all. they look great, though.

in IE, none of those rendered, but the lists all came in with a default "round bullet" style that looks perfectly presentable, so i decided it wasn't a big deal. the previous designed used a custom bullet graphic, but i wanted to avoid creating any icons for this design if possible, because every graphic the page must load slows down the page that much more. standard ascii/unicode bullets render that much faster.

but today i went in to work and checked it from there... at first i didn't notice anything wrong (so i have to wonder, was it always wrong, or did it originally render correctly and break sometime later in the day), but eventually i saw that the bullets were all rendering as question marks. i glanced at the source code and didn't see anything wrong with it. my work computer is also running firefox 1.0.1 so theoretically it should render the same. but the operating system is different (win2k). was that the cause of the question marks, or is something different about my work firefox installation than my home install? (this being a new computer, it's a totally fresh install, whereas the work install has been upgraded several times.)

i don't know, but i have to wonder whether there's much point in leaving the bullets as-is... how many people can even see them? i don't mind if IE users just see round bullets, because it doesn't look bad that way. but if lots of people are getting question marks or other funky junk, maybe i should just design new bullet icons after all.

this is what it's supposed to look like, in an ideal world:


if you're using IE, my guess is that you'll see round bullets.

go to the momcd blog and if you see something other than round bullets or the icons above, let me know. or if what you see in any way differs from what i predicted that you would see, i'd like to know that too.